


the mating dance of the awkward bastard

by geode



Series: for others! [5]
Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Gift Giving, Hanukkah
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-31
Updated: 2017-12-31
Packaged: 2019-02-24 14:22:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13215621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/geode/pseuds/geode
Summary: Hermann has a secret admirer, or possibly someone who's trying to kill him.





	the mating dance of the awkward bastard

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AnnetheCatDetective](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnnetheCatDetective/gifts).



> I'll be adding additional tags and what not later, but for now:
> 
> happy holidays!!! as usual, it's been a pleasure writing self indulgent gift-fic for you - it's something of our own tradition now lololol <3

Contrary to very popular belief, Hermann was not “a stick in the mud”, “a tight-arse”, or on one particularly gruelling occasion, “a party pooper”. He was simply busy; there were about a hundred things to do before the turn of the year and apparently he was the only one around here who was doing them so no thank you, take his name out of the hat and kindly have this conversation at the other end of the lab where people aren’t trying to do terribly important work that by all means deserves more attention than—whatever’s going on. He really doesn’t have the time nor the energy to care.

  
Hermann, fundamentally, was ignorant of little, so the ignorances he allowed himself (music history, fashion trends, the names of actors) were something of an odd pride, a marker of when a subject is  so truly useless that having no knowledge of it whatsoever won’t have a single consequence.

  
This should have been one of those things too trivial to even allocate a braincell, so Hermann did not, and was promptly blindsided in the third week of November when a tiny parcel appeared on his keyboard overnight.

  
1

  
He would have assumed it was a mistake had it not been for the ‘H’ written on the newspaper wrapping in permanent marker. In fact, had it not been for the ‘H’ he wouldn’t have thought it was a parcel at all but some kind of paper scrap that hadn’t quite made it to the bin.

  
He poked it with the arm of the glasses he’d got out to polish. It was lumpy, not exactly soft but not hard, didn’t make a noise. Hopefully it wasn’t a kidney or something equally as horrible meant for Dr Geiszler. Perhaps the ‘H’ was for ‘hazardous’? Perhaps it was anthrax. Perhaps it was from some kind of assassin, which these days would not be unwelcome.

After another poke, his affinity for the upper hand got the better of him and he decided that whatever it was was better off in the possession of someone who would dispose of it appropriately, if it came to that – Newton tended to hoard anything he was allowed to. Herman slid a nail under the parcel’s tape and managed to unstick and unroll rather efficiently with the free hand that wasn’t putting on his glasses. 

The contents was cryptic: a tube of toothpaste, a stock cube and a box of matches. All three had pink ribbon tied extravagantly around them with little bows curled on top. He frowned at these seemingly random items, and then it hit him, and he felt his cheeks heat up.

  
“Rations,” he muttered to himself. It was obvious now, the whole thing. Someone had given him a gift, and these days this was all anyone had. It was more than anyone should reasonably give away, really. It was… kind.

  
Which begged the question, who had it been? And why?

  
He cast his mind back over the last few days, weeks, searching for motive; if it had been a month from now, he wouldn’t think anything of it, maybe just feel a little bad that someone got him a Christmas present he didn’t remember to thank similarly, but it was bloody November, too early in the winter for this nonsense to start.

  
The… what was it called, Secret Santa? But he’d opted out. And again, it was November. Maybe someone thought it was his birthday. That’s very possible, few people know his birthday.

  
He stared at it a while longer, and then shook himself and placed the gifts in the top drawer of his desk to deal with later, chalking it up to a misunderstanding. A nice misunderstanding, but a misunderstanding all the same.

  
2

  
The appearance of a second parcel brought the realisation that he was the one who’d been misunderstanding.

  
It was Hanukkah, of course. Someone was doing… Secret Hanukkah. This was definitely not something anyone had talked about, so Hermann felt it fair to assume he wasn’t meant to be reciprocating in any way. Someone in the lab was merely amusing themselves by getting little gifts for everyone.

  
Today was hand sanitiser, and from the ‘dome label on the back it had evidently been taken from stock. This pleased Herman more than he’d like to admit, especially after the Halloween incident that had ended in the entire lab being drenched in fake kaiju blue. He was even more suspicious of the hygiene situation now. Whoever was doing it was clearly good at reading their audience. Herman guessed Jin: he’d always liked her.

  
3

  
By the time the third gift appeared (a mismatching glasses repair kit, with a jumbled tin of screws and things that had obviously been gathered rather than bought), it had become apparent that he was the only one in the lab who was receiving them. This Hermann concluded of a number of indicators: his was the only newspaper wrapping in the recycling bin, and they’re scientists – they recycle; nobody mentioned any mysterious gifts during their loud and inane kettle chatter, which you’d just think they would, being people who talk about everything all the time (much to his irritation); Hermann was always the first one in, and he never saw anything out of the ordinary on the other desks. Of course, individually these pieces of evidence could be explained away in several feasible ways, but Hermann’s whole job was to calculate probabilities, so he was confident in this conclusion.

  
It only made the ordeal more perplexing, however.

  
Even more so when it turned out it wasn’t Jin at all – at around lunchtime, she hissed “ _Oh, for heaven’s sake,_ ” and asked the room at large who stole her pink ribbon. Shrugs all around.

  
Someone was lying. She could be double-bluffing, doing some great performance or petulance, but he doubted it. Why would she put so much effort into doing this to him? Why would anyone?

  
4

  
The gloves were different, somehow. Whether intentionally or not, Hermann didn’t know, they revealed something about the sender: _insight_.

  
See, Hermann had notoriously bad circulation. His brothers had always teased him about it relentlessly. He had perpetually freezing hands in particular, much to his chagrin because gloves hindered his typing on screens, lost him his grip on pencils. But these gloves were different. They were black, made of a cheap looking material that didn’t give him much hope, but the fingertips were a slightly lighter grey. He squinted at them for a moment before he recalled something he’d read years ago. He pulled the glove over his index finger and tapped his screen to wake it. Just as he’d suspected, his touch worked through the glove. He logged in easily, fitting the rest of the glove over his hand. It was a instantly a lot more pleasant, and it appeared he wouldn’t be annoyed to death by having to take them off every time he needed to write something down.

  
Whoever this person was (not Jin), they were either an excellent observer (probably not Howard then) or they knew him better than he thought anyone here did.

 

5

  
This was confirmed on the fifth day, when his gift was a packet of Australian tea. Hermann blinked at the packet for a long few seconds, slightly floored. It was the exact type he had become so fond of when they were in Melbourne, the type that despite his best efforts he had run out of mid-September. Parkinson wasn’t even _in_ their department in Melbourne, so it can’t have been her. As usual, it could be a coincidence, but it was getting to a point where there were too many coincidences for that theory to hold up.

  
He made the tea slowly, savouring every moment of opening the packet, stirring, brewing. If he had had anyone to speak to, he wouldn’t have been able to for a few minutes, so caught up as he was. It was so unthinkably nice, just _nice_. It had been a long time since anyone had done anything for him for the niceness of it.

 

6

  
Day six messed with him a bit. It was three playing cards wrapped in an unnecessary amount of padding, presumably to deter from guesses about the parcel’s flat shape.  
Jack of spades. Five of diamonds. Eight of clubs.

  
For most of the morning, whenever he had a free moment, Hermann tried to work out if it’s some kind of code. Jack five eight? 2058? J-something? J-tech?

  
It annoyed him until noon, when he was rummaging around for his sharpener and came across his ancient Aviator pack under a pile of dossiers. It clicked in his head: he pulled a random card from the deck and flipped it over, doing the same with the three in the nest of wrapping by his elbow. The pattern on the underside was the same. He pulled out the rest of the deck and shuffled through it counting Jacks: diamonds, hearts, clubs—and no Jack of spades.

  
He grinned, quite involuntarily.

  
“They’ve finished it,” he murmured.

  
The Aviators were his mother’s, and it was one of the few things he’d kept carting around the ‘domes purely for sentimental reasons; he was loathe to part with it, despite the fact its age meant it was missing several cards. He hadn’t been able to play with them for years, always having to use the flimsy ones brought up from the mess, or Tendo Choi’s unsportsmanly rigged cards when none others are on offer.

  
Who was this person? Someone familiar with his recreation, his consumption, his habits – his sentiments, his complaints. Someone willing to track down or possibly actually recreate a lost heirloom for him.

  
He looked out across the lab floor, and cocked his head. No one seemed to fit that. He glanced back at the cards in his hand, the traces of his smile still on his pursed lips.

  
7

  
Gift seven almost brought down the whole system. It was too obvious, so goddamn obvious now Hermann thought about it.

  
Luckily for both of them there was a fire on the third floor at five in the morning and the majority of the day was spent in the kind of chaos that only occurs when six warring departments have to work together to protect the most important research on the planet going down the drain, so Hermann didn’t actually get to open it until much later.  
It was awful, all the people shouting and the flashing lights, and Hermann wanted to sleep forever when normalcy finally took the reins again. He trudged to the kitchen for some soup before he allowed himself to collapse for a few hours sleep before getting back to work.

  
He almost laughed when he saw the parcel in is usual place on his keyboard, despite the shitshow of the day. While the soup was heating, he sat down heavily at his desk and picked up the day’s gift. It was small and round, hard. He was too tired to guess much about it today. He unwrapped it unceremoniously, in rough tears through the paper, unable to be gentle in his exhaustion.

As soon as the contents began to peek through, he stopped, open palm falling to the desk. The object rolled from his fingers and bounced between the stacks of papers left haphazardly from the night before.

  
Gingerly, he reached for it again, not sure yet if he believed his own eyes.

  
A _Mozartkugel_.

  
It had been, what, thirty years? It had been a decade since he’d even _seen_ one.

  
His grandmother used to give the four of them each one with every visit; she’d get them to stand in height order, Hermann at the end, like a queen knighting her noblemen.  
It had been one of the first things to go, confectionary. No one was buying chocolate at the end of the world, and certainly not after it. He didn’t think he’d ever seen one again.

  
Newton probably thought he was being so smart.

  
The timer in the kitchen went off; Hermann poured out his soup, tucked the _Mozartkugel_ in his vest pocket, and retreated to his tiny room to black out almost instantly into an entirely dreamless sleep.

 

8

  
He caught Geiszler stuffing a woollen mass into a disproportionate amount of wrapping paper on his way into the lab.

  
Hermann was awake even earlier than normal, as he’d slept from five until eight the previous day and then one until half four, which was more than enough. Until he saw Newton sitting at Hermann’s desk wrestling with an something that wasn’t kaiju innards for once, a permanent marker wedged behind his left ear, he hadn’t remembered his epiphany in regards to the strange little presents.

  
Suddenly, it was all laid out between them both. Newton stared at him like a rabbit in headlights, frozen in place.

  
“Good morning, Dr Geiszler,” he said, as smugly as he could.

  
“Morning… Herms,” Newton faltered, aiming for nonchalance but failing catastrophically. He lasted about two and a half seconds before bursting. “ _Shit_ , dude, I’m sorry—it’s this damn paper, keeps ripping, took me ten minutes to work out how to get it to not rip and that used up all the shitting paper—and now I’ve ruined this whole thing, I was doing so well too—”

  
“You actually ruined it yesterday,” Hermann corrected him jovially. “Only you would dare to get me something from Germany.”

  
Hermann watched the cogs whir, relished in having the upper hand back at long, long last, and then Newton grinned. “Oh, _dare_ , is it?”

  
“Yes,” Hermann agreed.

  
Newton shook his head, and Hermann thought he heard him mutter “ _unglaublich_ ”, but before he can call him out on it he’s thrusting the half-wrapped package into Hermann’s arms.

  
He was prattling immediately: “Yeah, so, cool, here it is. Sorry it’s… y’know, kinda bad, nowhere had the same type of wool so I sent off for some but it didn’t come and then it _did_ come way too late so it’s just, well. And I’m not the best seamstress or whatever in the best circumstances, let alone—so like, I wouldn’t have left it ‘til last but I hadn’t finished it what with the February predicts going public on the 2nd—”

  
“Will you shut up, Newton!” Hermann demanded, gazing at the holey, wonky, appallingly patchwork-coloured scarf in his hands. For once in his life, Newton did shut up.

  
Hermann continued staring at the scarf, running his thumb over the bobbly thread, the fraying knot-ends.

  
“I’m—”

  
“It’s lovely,” Herman interrupted him. He looked up, met Newton’s eye. He swallowed, fumbling with his words. “It’s all been quite lovely. Thank you.”

  
After a second, Newton shrugged, but he was smiling. “Well, there’s only so much you can do in the apocalypse when it comes to presents, other than uh, steal and salvage and stuff.”

  
“And knit.”

  
He laughed. “And knit.”

  
“I’m…” Hermann started, not sure how to word it. “I’m sorry I didn’t get you anything in return.”

  
“Dude, _no_ , no no no, don’t even. This wasn’t even—I only—I mean, you remember Fay’s Secret Santa idea you scoffed at a couple weeks ago?”

  
“I don’t think I _scoffed_ —”

  
“You totally did, man, but yeah, got me thinking. No one else around here celebrates Hanukkah, not really. Thought it’d loosen you up to have some holiday cheer penetrate that shell of yours.”

  
Hermann glared at him. Newton beamed back.

  
“And clearly I failed! Never mind, there’s always next year.”

  
Hermann whipped his ankles with the scarf as he jumped up from Herman’s chair – _finally!_ – and skipped off to find something to dissect. It was especially cold in the lab that morning, the metal drawer handles of his desk stinging his skin. He looped the misshapen scarf around his neck, folding it once like he was taught, and tapped the computer’s _On_ button; the blue glow lit up his slight smile, and across the room Newt counted that as a _goddamn victory, baby._


End file.
